A thought experiment about China’s burden, a richer Muslim world, and why the 2060 map may look nothing like today’s consensus

Here is a thought experiment.

Not a prediction.

Not “these countries are definitely going to win.”

Just an attempt to imagine a world in 2060 that is genuinely discontinuous from the stories we tell ourselves in 2026.

Because thirty-year forecasts have a strange problem: they usually look suspiciously like the present.

Today, the familiar story goes something like this.

China remains the dominant Asian challenger to the United States.

India becomes the next great growth story.

Japan continues getting older and less relevant.

Russia continues shrinking from its Soviet past.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf remain rich but unusual.

Pakistan remains dysfunctional.

Egypt remains perpetually emerging.

Indonesia gets somewhat richer but never really matters at the highest level.

Central Asia stays peripheral.

The Muslim world remains economically fragmented: a handful of spectacularly wealthy oil monarchies sitting above hundreds of millions of people in much poorer countries.

Maybe.

But imagine reading a serious geopolitical forecast written in 1965.

It would probably have underestimated China.

It might have overestimated the Soviet Union.

It would almost certainly have misunderstood what was about to happen to South Korea, Singapore and Indonesia.

It could easily have treated Japan’s extraordinary growth as temporary catch-up rather than the beginning of one of the largest accumulations of private and foreign capital in history.

The problem is not that people in 1965 were stupid.

It is that the world of 1995 was not a scaled-up version of 1965.

The next thirty years probably won't be a scaled-up version of 2026 either.

So imagine a different map.

China remains powerful but becomes the aging, capital-rich incumbent increasingly forced to absorb the stresses of Asia around it.

India becomes much richer but proves less spectacular than the current hype implies.

The most surprising economic expansion instead occurs across a broad Muslim belt stretching from the Gulf through Central and South Asia into Southeast Asia and North Africa—not through a Chinese-style manufacturing miracle, but through an entirely different development model based on accumulated Gulf capital, infrastructure, resources, real estate, services and the gradual ASEAN-ization of countries that currently start from extremely low income levels.

Russia regains some strategic weight after its post-Soviet downsizing without recreating the Soviet Union.

And Japan, almost as an afterthought, discovers that being an old, rich creditor island in an increasingly complicated Asia is not such a terrible position after all.

That would be a much stranger world.

It may also be more historically normal than the straight-line forecast.

China may be entering the expensive phase of being powerful

For roughly forty years, almost every structural force worked in China's favor.

China's population rose toward 1.4 billion.

Its working-age population became vastly more productive.

Hundreds of millions of people moved from rural areas into cities.

Foreign capital arrived.

Factories arrived.

Technology arrived.

Infrastructure accumulated.

Exports exploded.

China moved from being a poor country with an enormous population to one of the world's great industrial and financial powers.

And importantly, China became heavier relative to almost everybody around it.

Japan experienced this directly.

Japan did not become poor after 1990. It remained extraordinarily wealthy, technologically sophisticated and one of the world's largest creditor states.

But China became dramatically more powerful beside it.

That alone changed Japan's strategic environment.

China may now be approaching the other side of that relationship.

Its population has already peaked, according to the UN, while several important Asian populations still have substantial demographic runway. China's economy remains enormous, but the era in which almost every decade automatically produced a larger demographic and industrial advantage over its neighbors is ending.

The relevant question for the next thirty years is therefore not:

Will China collapse?

Probably not.

China has already accumulated too much industrial capacity, infrastructure, financial wealth and organizational capability for “collapse” to be the interesting base case.

The more interesting question is:

How much of China's future national surplus will have to be spent simply maintaining the strategic position it already achieved?

That is a different problem.

Rising powers accumulate options.

Incumbent powers accumulate obligations.

The neighborhood around China is becoming more expensive

Look around China from Beijing.

India is no longer a distant poor giant that can be mostly ignored. Even if India disappoints today's most bullish expectations, another thirty years of respectable growth makes it substantially heavier.

Indonesia does not have to become Japan to matter. A country of nearly 300 million people moving from roughly $5,000 per capita toward middle-income status becomes one of the central economies of Asia. Indonesia's GDP per capita was only about $5,060 in 2025, despite an economy already around $1.45 trillion.

Vietnam, the Philippines and other Southeast Asian states become richer and more capable.

Pakistan remains strategically unavoidable.

Central Asia matters increasingly because Chinese infrastructure, energy and trade routes run through it.

Japan and South Korea remain capital-rich technological powers.

Taiwan remains unresolved.

The United States remains involved across several of these relationships.

And then there is Russia.

For China, a weaker Russia currently looks useful. It can mean cheaper resources and more Chinese bargaining power.

But weak great powers do not necessarily remain cheap neighbors forever.

A declining, enormous, nuclear-armed Russian state sharing thousands of kilometers of border with China could eventually become something Beijing has to stabilize, finance, accommodate or continuously manage.

The same principle applies farther south.

If Pakistan becomes unstable while China owns strategically important infrastructure there, it becomes partly China's problem.

If Myanmar destabilizes, Yunnan cannot pretend nothing happened.

If Central Asian states become politically fragile, China cannot ignore pipelines and trade routes.

If India becomes more capable, China has to balance it.

If Southeast Asia becomes richer, those governments gain more bargaining power.

Great powers eventually discover that regional influence comes with maintenance costs.

That may be one of China's defining transitions between now and 2060.

For forty years, Asia supplied China with opportunities.

The next forty may increasingly supply China with bills.

India may rise—and still disappoint

India is the easiest country to put at the center of the standard 2050 story.

The population is enormous.

Growth is already fast.

It has a huge technology sector and a globally successful diaspora.

It has obvious catch-up potential.

None of that is wrong.

But that's precisely why India feels less interesting as a surprise.

India has already grown substantially since the early 1990s. “India will become much richer” is no longer a contrarian thesis.

What I would question is the increasingly casual assumption that India necessarily gets a China-style transformation simply because China is aging and India is younger.

Demographics do not manufacture roads.

They don't move workers automatically from low-productivity employment into highly productive urban companies.

They don't create an East Asian industrial supply chain by themselves.

And they don't guarantee the extraordinary administrative execution that China demonstrated during its development phase.

India can become one of the largest economies in the world while still producing a thirty-year result that feels disappointing relative to what people expect today.

That still matters geopolitically.

China does not need India to become richer than China for India to become much more expensive to balance.

But the really surprising economic story may happen elsewhere.

The Muslim world already isn't small

Take a deliberately limited group of Muslim-majority countries we've been discussing—not the entire Muslim world.

Count:

• Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar;
• Indonesia and Malaysia;
• Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan;
• Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan;
• Iran;
• and, from Africa, only Egypt, Algeria and Morocco.

Together, this basket is already roughly a $7 trillion economy in 2026.

That is about 5½% of world nominal GDP.

And it still excludes Turkey, which would add another roughly $1.5–1.6 trillion by itself.

So this is not some economically irrelevant periphery waiting to develop someday.

There is already substantial economic mass.

What makes the region interesting is how extraordinarily unevenly that mass is distributed.

At one end are some of the world's richest capital-owning states.

At the other are enormous populations still operating from remarkably low income levels.

And above this ladder sit Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar—not primarily as low-cost convergence stories, but as enormous pools of accumulated capital.

Saudi Arabia alone is roughly a $1.4 trillion economy in the IMF's 2026 outlook. Add the UAE and Qatar and the three Gulf states together contribute more than $2 trillion to the broader economic system.

That creates a regional structure that did not really exist several generations ago:

That is the important configuration.

The region does not need every country to become Japan.

It does not even need every country to become Malaysia.

The sheer gap between today's starting points tells you how much room exists.

Pakistan starts around $1,600 per person.

Bangladesh around $2,600.

Egypt around $3,100.

Indonesia around $5,100.

Meanwhile Malaysia and Kazakhstan already demonstrate that countries inside the broader Muslim world can operate around $13,000–15,000 per person without becoming Switzerland, Japan or South Korea.

That gap is the economic opportunity.

If some large portion of today's poorer countries merely moves toward something resembling contemporary ASEAN middle income, the aggregate effect becomes enormous.

You don't need another China

This is where the arithmetic becomes surprisingly powerful.

The basket is roughly:

$7 trillion today.

Imagine that over the next three decades it simply becomes three times larger in real economic scale.

That gives you roughly:

$21 trillion in today's dollars.

That is approximately the size of China's entire economy today.

And this does not require Pakistan to become Korea.

It could happen through something far more mundane:

• Indonesia moving substantially toward Malaysian income levels;
• Pakistan becoming a respectable middle-income economy;
• Bangladesh continuing its existing convergence;
• Egypt getting basic infrastructure and macroeconomic management right;
• Morocco and Uzbekistan compounding steadily;
• Kazakhstan and Malaysia getting richer;
• Gulf capital continuing to accumulate and increasingly flowing outward.

The striking thing is how low the starting point remains.

A country at $2,000–5,000 per person does not need frontier technology to double or triple living standards.

It needs capital.

Electricity.

Roads.

Housing.

Ports.

Machinery.

Logistics.

Urban infrastructure.

Financing.

Telecommunications.

That is why the next Muslim-world development cycle, if it happens, may look much more like an ASEAN-ization than an East Asian miracle.

And for hundreds of millions of people, ASEAN-level development would already be an extraordinary transformation.

They do not need to become Japan

When people hear “development,” they tend to imagine that Pakistan needs to become South Korea or that Indonesia needs to become Japan.

That makes the hurdle appear almost impossibly high.

But perhaps that is the wrong target.

Imagine instead that over thirty or forty years a significant portion of this lower-income group simply converges toward something resembling Malaysia or Kazakhstan today.

Not Switzerland.

Not Singapore.

Not Korea.

Just broad middle-income modernity.

Reliable electricity.

Modern roads.

Airports.

Ports.

Air conditioning.

Functional housing.

Urban transit.

Digital payments.

Logistics.

Hospitals.

Modern retail.

Industrial parks.

Resource processing.

Tourism.

Construction.

Decent telecommunications.

A large consumer class.

This does not require every country to develop world-leading universities or a semiconductor industry.

It does not require Pakistan to produce Japanese-style educational discipline.

It does not require Egypt to create a German Mittelstand.

It requires enormous amounts of relatively mundane capital.

And that is precisely what part of the Muslim world has suddenly accumulated.

The first leap may be much easier than the last one

There is an enormous difference between moving an economy from $2,000 per person toward $8,000 or $10,000 and moving it from $20,000 toward $50,000.

At very low starting points, basic capital deepening can transform productivity.

Take the same worker and give him reliable electricity instead of outages.

Put the firm next to a functioning highway.

Give it modern machinery.

Connect it to a port.

Make payments reliable.

Build urban housing that allows workers to move.

Provide commercial financing.

Improve water and sanitation.

Reduce the number of hours lost moving goods through a dysfunctional logistics system.

None of this is frontier science.

But the productivity difference can be enormous.

That is why Indonesia is such an important reference point.

Indonesia is not Japan.

Its educational outcomes and productivity still leave enormous room for improvement.

Yet it has already built a $1.45 trillion economy with GDP per capita above $5,000 and essentially universal electricity access.

Malaysia is farther along at roughly $13,100 per capita.

These are not impossible reference points for the next thirty years.

And when the starting population is 100 million, 175 million or 255 million, simply reaching that kind of baseline has enormous global consequences.

Triple the current economy and you already get something China-sized

Here is the simplest way to see the scale.

Take that roughly $7 trillion Muslim-country basket today.

Now don't assume a Chinese miracle.

Don't assume 8% annual growth for thirty years.

Don't assume Pakistan becomes Korea.

Simply imagine that, in real today's-dollar terms, the group becomes roughly three times larger by around 2060.

That gives you an economy of roughly $21 trillion in today's economic scale.

That is approximately the size of China's entire economy today.

And the thought experiment is not outrageous precisely because many of the largest populations in the group are starting so low.

Pakistan doesn't need to triple an already-$50,000 income.

It starts around $1,600.

Egypt starts near $3,100.

Bangladesh around $2,600.

Uzbekistan around $4,000.

Indonesia around $5,000.

Morocco below $5,000.

There is an enormous amount of basic convergence available before anyone needs to solve frontier innovation.

That is why a Muslim-region growth story does not require a new China.

It may only require a lot of countries becoming decently middle income at the same time.

The missing ingredient may have been Muslim capital

What makes this more plausible in 2026 than it would have been in 1970 is not religion.

It is capital.

For much of the twentieth century, the Muslim world had rich oil producers, but it did not have the same self-reinforcing regional development ladder that East Asia eventually created.

East Asia had Japan.

Japan was not merely an inspirational example.

Japan accumulated capital and exported it.

As Japanese wages rose and industries became more sophisticated, capital, factories, production methods and supply chains moved into poorer Asian economies.

The Asian Development Bank describes this historically through the “flying geese” pattern, where industrial activity and investment progressively spread from more advanced Asian economies toward followers.

Then the followers became investors themselves.

Japan was followed by Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore.

Parts of ASEAN moved upward.

China entered the ladder.

Eventually Chinese capital itself began moving outward.

Development became a regional process rather than an isolated national miracle.

The Muslim world may now be acquiring the beginnings of something analogous.

But it probably won't look Japanese.

Saudi Arabia and the UAE are role models—but for a different model

Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar are not industrial Japan.

They did not become rich because scarce natural resources forced them to turn every citizen into an export-competitive industrial worker.

Their development sequence was almost the reverse.

Natural resources generated enormous rents.

Those rents created sovereign capital.

Sovereign capital financed infrastructure, property, airlines, logistics, financial centers, technology purchases and global investments.

Foreign labor supplied much of the manpower.

The state remained central to capital allocation.

That produces a different political economy from Japan or Korea.

But it may nevertheless create an enormously important regional demonstration effect.

A Pakistani, Egyptian or Indonesian looking at Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Doha or increasingly Riyadh does not see an abstract Western model.

They see societies that are culturally much more recognizable yet possess world-class airports, roads, digital government, financial institutions, modern cities and enormous international capital.

That matters.

And the relationship isn't merely psychological.

There is already institutional connective tissue.

The Islamic Development Bank has 57 member countries, covering about one-fifth of humanity. Saudi Arabia is its largest shareholder at 23.5%; Iran, Qatar, Indonesia, Egypt and the UAE are also among its major shareholders.

That does not mean an integrated Islamic economic bloc is around the corner.

It means the financial architecture connecting capital-rich and capital-poor Muslim countries already exists.

The Gulf doesn't need to turn Pakistan into an export superpower

This may be the biggest difference from East Asia.

Japan's development model put enormous pressure on firms to become internationally productive.

Could Sony sell abroad?

Could Toyota compete with foreign manufacturers?

Could Japanese engineers improve quality enough to move upward?

That process eventually created huge numbers of highly skilled productive citizens.

The Gulf-centered model may work differently.

Imagine Saudi, Emirati and Qatari capital flowing increasingly into Pakistan, Indonesia, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and other connected economies.

What does it buy?

Energy systems.

Ports.

Housing.

Airports.

Mining.

Logistics.

Telecommunications.

Data centers.

Tourism.

Financial services.

Food production.

Industrial parks.

Real estate.

Transport corridors.

Perhaps some manufacturing, but not necessarily manufacturing as the organizing principle of society.

That can still create huge increases in income.

It may just create a different kind of middle-income country.

Less Korea.

More ASEAN.

“ASEAN-level” is a much bigger outcome than it sounds

People often use “middle income” as though it means failure.

But consider what the change means from today's starting point.

Malaysia at about $13,100 per capita is more than eight times Pakistan's current nominal GDP per capita.

Even getting Pakistan to half of contemporary Malaysia's level would represent a radical transformation for more than a quarter-billion people.

Egypt does not need to become France.

If it moves from roughly $3,100 per capita toward something resembling today's upper-middle-income economies, the absolute change in domestic consumption, infrastructure, tax capacity and state power would be enormous.

Indonesia already demonstrates the intermediate stage.

Kazakhstan demonstrates that a resource-rich Muslim-majority state outside the Gulf can already sit near $15,000 per capita.

Uzbekistan, currently below $4,000 per person, can look north at Kazakhstan rather than having to imagine Switzerland as its developmental endpoint.

This is what regional role models do.

They lower the imaginative distance.

Indonesia may be the bridge

Indonesia may be the country that makes this system particularly interesting.

It belongs simultaneously to two developmental worlds.

Geographically and economically, it sits inside the East Asian and Southeast Asian production system.

Singapore is next door.

Malaysia is already a much richer cultural and economic reference point.

Japanese, Korean and Chinese capital already circulate throughout the region.

But Indonesia is also the world's largest Muslim-majority country.

So it potentially connects:

East Asian production networks,

Singaporean and Malaysian management models,

and Gulf sovereign capital.

Today Indonesia is still primarily a recipient of capital.

But imagine it at $10,000 or $15,000 per capita with roughly 300 million people.

At that point Indonesia itself begins generating much larger pension funds, corporations, banks, investment pools and overseas capital.

Then the system changes again.

The capital ladder no longer runs only:

Gulf → Indonesia.

It can eventually run:

Gulf and Singapore → Malaysia and Indonesia → poorer regional economies.

That is how a development system becomes self-reinforcing.

Pakistan could look radically different if its neighborhood becomes richer

Pakistan is currently easy to dismiss.

That may be precisely why it is interesting over a thirty-year horizon.

It has more than 255 million people but only about $407 billion of GDP and roughly $1,596 per person today.

That is an astonishingly low capital base for a country of that scale.

Now imagine Pakistan in 2055, not in isolation but inside a different neighborhood.

Saudi Arabia and the Gulf are much larger capital exporters.

Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are richer.

Iran has perhaps normalized enough to reconnect more deeply with international capital.

India is substantially richer.

Indonesia and Malaysia are larger pools of Muslim and Asian capital.

The Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean economies are more integrated.

At that point Pakistan becomes a gigantic low-cost economy sitting in the middle of a much wealthier surrounding system.

It has land.

Workers.

Consumers.

Ports.

Minerals.

Agriculture.

Strategic geography.

A huge domestic market.

The development question is no longer:

Can Pakistan suddenly become Korea?

It becomes:

Can regional capital raise the amount of productive infrastructure surrounding an ordinary Pakistani worker by several multiples?

That is a much lower bar.

And if the answer is yes, the absolute economic increase is enormous.

Bangladesh is another reminder that today's category can change quickly

Bangladesh is already about a $456 billion economy, with per-capita GDP around $2,600, despite having been treated for decades as almost synonymous with extreme poverty.

Its development has not looked like Japan.

That is the point.

You don't need the entire population to become highly educated engineers to create substantial movement from extreme poverty toward a mass consumer economy.

If Bangladesh, Pakistan, Egypt, Indonesia and parts of Central Asia each follow different versions of that path, the aggregate matters more than whether any single one produces a miracle.

And the political result may look nothing like East Asia

This is another reason the future could surprise us.

The East Asian production model eventually created large populations of industrial workers, engineers, managers, entrepreneurs and technically educated middle-class households.

National power increasingly depended on broadly distributed human productivity.

The Gulf model begins with concentrated capital.

That can produce a more top-down political economy.

You can have world-class infrastructure.

Huge sovereign wealth funds.

Modern airports.

Advanced military equipment.

Large construction industries.

Sophisticated logistics.

Global financial investments.

And still have capital allocation remain heavily concentrated around the state and a relatively narrow elite.

If this model diffuses outward, the resulting Muslim middle-income world may therefore not become a collection of liberal industrial democracies.

It could remain:

more authoritarian,

more unequal,

more resource-oriented,

more property-heavy,

more dependent on sovereign and large-family capital,

and less innovative per capita than East Asia.

Yet still become dramatically richer and more powerful.

Those are not contradictions.

A country does not need Japanese productivity per worker to become geopolitically important if it has 200 or 300 million people.

This may be the real positive surprise of 2060

The consensus version of global convergence tends to look like:

China happened, now India happens, eventually Africa happens.

I'm less convinced.

India will probably become much richer, but that story is already well known.

Sub-Saharan Africa faces a much harder connection problem to the dense Eurasian production and capital networks we're discussing.

The Muslim belt is different.

It stretches across some of the world's most important geographic nodes.

The Gulf.

The Mediterranean.

Central Asia.

The Indian Ocean.

The Strait of Malacca.

South Asia.

Southeast Asia.

And unlike forty years ago, the region now contains its own enormous pools of accumulated capital.

That last point may turn out to matter more than we think.

Russia may also be mispriced—but for a different reason

Russia is a smaller part of this thought experiment.

Its positive-surprise story is not demographic or Chinese-style economic growth.

It is that the post-Soviet Russian state may eventually prove to be a more sustainable strategic unit than the Soviet Union was.

Moscow lost roughly half the Soviet population in 1991 while retaining most of the territory, resources, nuclear arsenal and military-industrial core.

That was a catastrophic contraction.

But it was also a massive downsizing of administrative obligations.

If Russia eventually stops trying to directly recreate the USSR and instead settles into a model of controlling a Russian core while maintaining influence over selected neighboring states, it could regain geopolitical weight without recreating the full costs of empire.

A richer Central Asia could even become an asset rather than something Moscow needs to subsidize.

Russia would remain demographically weak.

It wouldn't become China.

But over thirty years, resource wealth, Arctic geography, military capacity and strategic position between Europe and Asia can be repriced considerably.

And Japan may quietly end up in a better position than expected

Japan is the least dramatic part of the thesis.

It will probably continue aging.

Its population will probably continue shrinking.

Its economic growth may remain unimpressive.

But Japan has already accumulated an enormous stock of capital and technological capability.

If China becomes increasingly burdened by a more complicated Asian neighborhood, while Southeast Asia becomes richer and Russia seeks alternatives to excessive Chinese dependence, Japan's relative strategic value can rise even without another Japanese economic miracle.

Japan does not need to dominate Asia.

It needs to remain rich, technologically capable, financially deep and difficult to coerce.

In a more multipolar Asia, that may be enough.

The strange thing would be if 2060 looks exactly like 2026

None of this is a forecast I would bet everything on.

China may adapt better than expected.

India may genuinely produce a second Asian miracle.

Gulf capital may remain trapped in property, prestige projects and Western financial assets.

Pakistan may waste another thirty years.

Iran may remain isolated.

Russia may exhaust itself rather than consolidate.

Indonesia may get stuck at middle income.

That is why this is a thought experiment.

But there is a broader lesson.

Thirty-year futures are rarely generated by simply extending today's winners upward and today's losers sideways.

Today's successful countries eventually accumulate costs.

Today's poor countries inherit cheap labor, low capital bases and enormous catch-up opportunities.

Today's strange regional experiments become tomorrow's institutions.

And capital that has already accumulated somewhere eventually looks for somewhere else to go.

The Muslim-country basket described here is already roughly a $7 trillion economic zone even before Turkey and many smaller Muslim economies are counted.

Yet some of its largest countries still sit at income levels between roughly $1,600 and $5,000 per person.

That combination is unusual:

large existing economic mass at the top, enormous accumulated capital in a few countries, and hundreds of millions of people still starting from very low capital per person.

If even part of that gap closes, you don't need a miracle.

You get scale simply from convergence.

Triple the current economic base in real terms by around 2060 and the region becomes roughly a $21 trillion economy in today's economic scale—something comparable to China today.

And perhaps that is the more interesting way to imagine the next thirty years.

Not by asking:

Which country becomes the next China?

But:

What happens when regions that never had enough locally accumulated capital finally acquire it?

East Asia answered that question once.

The Muslim world may be beginning to answer it in a completely different way.